Devices/Embedded: MAKERphone, ESP32, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 14, 2026

• It's FOSS ☛ MAKERphone 2.0 Lets You Build a 4G Phone and Vibe-Code Its Apps

  It runs on an ESP32-S3, takes a real SIM for 4G calls and texts, snaps together without soldering. Code your own app, away from social control media.

• CNX Software ☛ JetKVM Mini – A low-cost, ESP32-P4X-based KVM with Ethernet or WiFi connectivity

  JetKVM Mini is a smaller, lower-cost version of the popular JetKVM KVM over IP solution. The new model features a small information display, offers Ethernet or WiFi connectivity, and supports 1080p video capture. The main under-the-hood change is that they ditched GNU/Linux on a Rockchip RV1106G3 SoC and now rely on an ESP32-P4X (ESP32-P4 version 3.x and greater) to handle video capture, H.264 encoding, USB, and other features. The largest cost saving is removing the RAM and eMMC flash required by Linux.

• Hackaday ☛ Spin FV-1 Emulator Simplifies Sound Pedal Development

  As for the FV-1 itself, it’s an interesting little chip in that it’s quite a full-featured DSP– rather, it’s small instruction set is focused entirely on audio effects. If you’re into that world– be it guitar pedals or otherwise– you may find this project very useful. There are releases for Linux, MacOS and Windows, and it’s all open-source on GitHub, under the Mozilla Public License. It’s not the most common choice, but we’re hardly going to complain about licenses to anyone willing to share their hard work.

• Hackaday ☛ Whip-Cracking Machine Reliably Breaks The Sound Barrier

  For greater convenience, [Craig] built this into a launcher mechanism, with the elastic cord wrapped around the end of the launcher, an electrical-conduit guide for the whip, and a spring-loaded trigger mechanism to release it. This worked even better than expected, getting a reliable crack every time. The tip of the whip could slice leaves, tear open aluminium cans, put out candle flames, knock the cap off a bottle without tipping it over, and reliably hit small targets on the first shot.

• Hackaday ☛ Keeping Time On Tumbling Icosahedra

  Each 3D-printed icosahedron has numerals sunk through each of its twelve sides, and is raised above the base of the clock on a brass support shaft. An inner drive shaft runs through the center of the support shaft and drives a set of beveled gears. These spin the outer shells around two axes, periodically cycling through all twelve faces. The pattern in which an icosahedron rotates means that only set of numerals appears upright at a time, making it easier to distinguish the time.

• Hackaday ☛ A 386 PC For Your RP2350

  Having seen tiny386 run on its minimum-spec ESP32 platform, we’ll concede that while it’s usable, it’s not the fastest experience, but the RP2350 port promises better performance. It’s not for a modern full-fat Linux distro, but should work well for running older operating systems such as DOS, or Windows 3.1 and 95, or even a lean Linux setup. This has fascinating potential: while these systems are old, they still have an enormous software library. The idea of useful general-purpose computing, 1990s style, in the palm of the hand, is interesting.

• A6MZero ☛ This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

  I have been wanting to design a simple PCB for the last couple of years now. The thought of converting a design idea into a physical board and programming it to do things is fascinating to me. Long story short, I procrastinated until I tried to vibe-generate a dead simple PCB with Claude Opus 4.8 and it was terrible ! It had no idea about the orientation of the components, it did not do any proper routing. I was disappointed and accepted the fact that these tools were not there yet.

  Then arrived the Fable 5. At first I was not that hopeful. One Thursday evening, around 10 hours before my weekly reset for Claude, I decided to give it another try; this time with Fable 5.

• [Old] New Yorker ☛ The Chudnovsky Brothers and the Mountains of Pi

  Gregory Chudnovsky’s partner in the design and construction of the supercomputer was his older brother, David Volfovich Chudnovsky, who is also a mathematician, and who lives five blocks away from Gregory. The Chudnovsky brothers call their machine m zero. It occupies the former living room of Gregory’s apartment, and its tentacles reach into other rooms. The brothers claim that m zero is a “true, general-purpose supercomputer,” and that it is as fast and powerful as a somewhat older Cray Y-MP, but it is not as fast as the latest of the Y-MP machines, the C90, an advanced supercomputer made by Cray Research. A Cray Y-MP C90 costs more than thirty million dollars. It is a black monolith, seven feet tall and eight feet across, in the shape of a squat cylinder, and is cooled by liquid freon. So far, the brothers have spent around seventy thousand dollars on parts for their supercomputer, and much of the money has come out of their wives’ pockets.